Despite the fact that the U.S. Metric Association have advocated metrication for nearly 100 years, many cookbooks still use US customary weights and volume measures. When following a recipe calling for teaspoons, tablespoons, fluid ounces, cups, pints, quarts or even gallons, I’ve often found myself using conversion websites such as Convert-me, picking ingredients from a list and entering the amount and unit. This works OK for single ingredients, but is less practical when converting a complete recipe. I therefore made a calculator to convert volumetric units to grams based on densities of a range of common ingredients. It has greatly simplified the task for me, and perhaps you’ll find it useful as well?

Download calculatorvolume-weight-conversion-v2.xlsm (Excel 2007 file, 82 KB) – UPDATED!
(Please note that the autocomplete function requires that you enable the macro. If you experienced problems with the xlsm file being downloaded in zip format, please try again now. A small server update has been implemented to fix the problem.)

Features
Includes densities of about 200 275 ingredients.
Easy entering of data with autocomplete function and drop-down list.
Dynamic rounding of results to yield more realistic recipes (“120 g” water makes more sense than “118.29 g” which would be a more exact, but less practical conversion of 1/2 cup).
Optional scaling of the recipe

Navigation
Use tab or left/right arrow to navigate in/out of ingredients
Autocomplete feature in ingredient field requires macros to be enabled
Use up/down arrows to navigate up/down in drop down list of ingredients

Comments

If you’re looking for more data, the USDA nutrient database has “household weights” data for a lot of items: e.g. a pat of butter, a clove of garlic, a cup of garlic, a cup of chopped onion (160g), a cup of sliced onion (115g).

It looks like this database was the source for aqua-calc.com, but they don’t seem to be exposing all of the weight data via their web UI.

Steve: Wow – a great resource. I’ll see how I can incorporate some of the data.

Brandon: A good observation, but no – this is intentional and the formula is correct! The reason for this is that oz (ounce) is a unit of mass, so 1 oz = 28.3 g regardless of the density. Note however that floz (fluid ounce) which is a unit of volume does take density into consideration.

isaia: Feel free to do that! But typing ingredients/amounts on a table/phone is so cumbersome that I’d personally prefer a PC with a keyboard. Then I could also print out the results and bring that into the kitchen. But maybe it’s only me being old fashined?

Martin – this is amazing, and a resource I will use over the hastily assembled conversions I’ve worked out myself over the years. As a chef who is regrettably forced to express my own metric recipes in volume measurements, I would love to see someone create a ‘metric to volume’ calculator to save even more time!

My Linux “Calc” warns of potential viri or malware as POSSIBLY being present. I’m certain that this is not the case here. (I’m disregarding man-in-the-middle attacks). None the less, it would be nice if a checksum were available. Towards the bottom of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checksum are a number of free applets for MS, MAC and Linux/Unix. Most free.

Hi, Martin,
Any hope of incorporating imperial measures?
I’m using this for a cookery course for the Department of Education of Ireland. We mostly use imperial.
I’ll try and edit it myself if I can get some spare time!
Regards and thanks
Nick

Hi, Martin,
Thank you for your reply.
Yes, those measures would be good together with the imperial teaspoon (tsp) and the imperial tablespoon (tbsp).
It’s a really good resource; I’ve (slightly) amended it and used it in the classroom to calculate cost prices for recipes. The ‘scale’ button is a really useful idea.

I found that Numbers.app doesn’t like the formula in column E (it doesn’t support the “Array” stuff). If you replace the column E formula with the one shown below and use tsp/tbsp instead of t/T (the lookup is case-insensitive), it will work. (The clear button and autocomplete do not work, however.)

Show column E, place this in E7, and copy/drag E7 into the rest of the E cells: